This isn't an easy pattern to understand. If you take market failure theories seriously, it's child's play to apply them expression. Negative externalities? Come on - many bloggers write for the sole purpose of offending others! Asymmetric information? Hey, if information were symmetric, what would be the point of sharing your thoughts with the world?
I'm curious about why economists so uniformly embrace civil liberties. But I'm especially curious about why so many non-libertarian economists end up being civil libertarians. So I'll aim my questions at the latter group - but whatever your view, feel free to chime in.
Questions:1. Are markets for ideas/culture less subject to market failure than other markets? Why or why not?
2. Is well-intended regulation of idea/culture markets more likely to have unintended negative consequences than well-intended regulation of other markets?
3. Is regulation of idea/culture markets less likely to be well-intended than regulation of other markets?
4. Is the average consumer a better judge of his own best interest in idea/culture markets than in other markets?
5. Is efficiency less normatively important in idea/culture markets than in other markets? If so, what normative goal(s) do we satisfy by sacrificing efficiency?
6. Should countries with weak civil liberties liberalize their regulation of idea/culture markets? If so, would you advocate "shock therapy"? Why or why not?
Just so you can't accuse me of having a hidden agenda, let me state my agenda openly. I think that the typical social democratic economist's arguments in favor of civil liberties are much weaker than the typical free-market economist's arguments in favor of laissez-faire for the broader economy. If a free-market economist opposed regulation of the oil industry on the same grounds that the typical economist opposes regulation of religion, the typical economist would dismiss him as a "market fundamentalist."
If we think of academics as being dominant players in the marketplace of ideas, this doesn't seem to me to be all that different from the liberal professionals I know who can explain why every industry except the one they happen to work for needs heavier regulation. But then I'm a market fundamentalist in all markets, including those for ideas, so you'd expect me to say that.
I read that Caplan post yesterday. I was kinda hoping to hear some responses from the types of economist he's challenging. Nothing yet that I've seen..,
Anyone see a response?
Okay, I'll bite. How about because the "marketplace of ideas" is in fact a political notion, and the ideas we are most interested in protecting are the ones that involve criticism of the political and social order? As far as I'm concerned, you need the free flow of ideas before you can have an open debate about the correct level of government regulation in any other area. This is true regardless of how much regulation you actually want in those other areas.
I think it is a kind of sloppy reification to say there is a "market for ideas" in the same way that there is say, a market for grain, but anyways...
For argument's sake, suppose someone is spouting nonsense on the internet or AM radio. I don't have to listen to it, read it, believe it or act upon. There is no need for me to strike any kind of coasian bargain because I'm not harmed. However, let us assume there is negative externality to free speech - maybe they gin up support for a war that I get drafted to fight in. So there is an externality, but I think reasonable people can accept that gov't intervention to regulate speech is worse than the cure in this case.
Now, consider the market failure of air pollution. Are we suppose to believe that the intervention - say regulations or tradeable permits - is really worse than the cure in this case? Maybe it is, but it is not nearly as clear cut as the "ideas" example.
Let's change this question around a little bit. How come all the libertarians I know claim to be for both civil liberties and open markets, but spend just about ALL of their time arguing for the latter and none of their time arguing for the former.
To use our tall friend as an example, how many times have we seen posts here about social inequality against which to rail? On the other hand, how many times have we heard about just how awful terrible it is that we have to pay taxes and that the government runs the DMV and there shouldn't be any regulation of this, that or the other?
Why is money so much more important to "libertarians" than freedom from discrimination?
Nutella,
Look around a little more then. You're myopic experience doesn't translate into anything conclusive about libertarians.
Check out Reason Magazine's Hit and Run Blog, for example and just scroll down and get a feel for the proportion of civil liberties topics. It's quite a bit.
Also, Nutella:
"Social Inequality"...at least how I know you mean it...isn't a civil liberties issue.
Nutella is better on bread than toast,
It's already highly frowned upon and in many/most cases illegal to discriminate on a variety of factors.
When someone passes a law prohibiting idiots/paper pushers who don't care about helping you and instead feel obligated to get a paycheck from working at the DMV then we can talk. Not that there aren't nice people working at many DMVs...actually now that I think about it, the places where I've had pleasant DMV experiences were all small town places -- the kind of place where a DMV job was a good job.
And M.C. I think it's just swell that you find political notions the most important think to protect. I on the other hand consider feeding my family just as -if not more so when you get right down to it- important.
Nutella, it's because conventional wisdom, especially in the media, is so hostile to economic freedom. If economic freedom wasn't as constantly under assault as political freedom isn't, libertarians would speak about it less.
But there is also a far more fundamental point: in day to day life normal people worry more about making a living and getting ahead than they do about whether some federal agency is going to knock down their door without a warrant. The economic worry is a more immediate and more basic one.
And finally, economic freedom is a precursor to political freedom. Not vice versa. That's why you can have prosperous dictatorships like China (and why I suspect the dictatorship will have to loosen over time), but it's very rare and probably unheard of to have poverty-wracked free countries with extensive civil liberties.
As long as we live in a democracy that can have one pool of voters vote themselves theft from another pool, we don't live in a "marketplace of ideas". That would only apply to the Constitutional Convention of the founding fathers during the late 1780s.
"How come all the libertarians I know claim to be for both civil liberties and open markets, but spend just about ALL of their time arguing for the latter and none of their time arguing for the former."
Because free speech is well established, while the free market is more regularly threatened.
NutellaonToast,
this isn't just privileged griping, it's also about the poor getting screwed. The minimum wage is a denial of economic civil liberty, but I worry about it less with employers and more when it means that people with no work experience aren't able to sell their labor legally or establish work history and must turn to the black market, especially in disadvantaged groups like teenagers and those who lack access to education. It's also an economic civil rights issue when people with capital assets like cars or spare rooms or marketable skills like cosmetology are forbidden from leveraging them into business opportunities because of local regulatory regimes that require rationed licenses to work in those fields. The right to buy and sell what you will at and agreeable price is a fundamental one of vital importance to those that face real poverty -- and one that they are consistently denied, often with the vigorous support of those who claim to be on their side.
Also, (unqualified) discrimination isn't bad. I discriminate all the time. For instance, when I interviewed people and made recommendations to my employer I discriminated on the basis of whether they gave a good interview, the condition of their credentials, and whether or not they have education and experience relevant to the job. When my friends looked for a pastor to marry them I discriminated on the basis of religion -- among other things. When I looked for an actor to play a character with a given ethnicity I discriminated on the basis of ethnicity -- among other things. What else should I do, just make every choice randomly? If you want to make a point about how we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of certain qualia in certain circumstances, well, argue that point, but the general case is quite absurd.
Security in property rights (the owning of your own labor and thrift product) is a necessary condition to the exercise of many of your secondary civil liberties. This is the proper order of priority. Try exercising your right to free speech when anything you own can be arbitrarily taken from you and given to someone else.
Every true libertarian fights to protect the broad range of negative rights. Any that don't are not real libertarians- including the hostess of this blog. However, I still like and admire her- she is more consistent in her positions than almost all of the so-called "civil libertarians".
sam -
And what actions by the state would be most likely to lead to your being able to feed your family? Is this entirely known? Has it ever been?
If this can be debated freely, and the bums can be thrown out of office if they don't deliver, you are more likely to get the result you want than if all avenues for discussion and change are closed. Political and social ideas aren't the most valuable things in and of themselves. They are valuable because they move societies along.
Now, I happen to think we want a great deal of freedom for economic activity as well. Too much regulation is a problem. But there is also the issue of always having someone who doesn't report to the boss to keep a company (or for that matter a government agency) honest. How we balance these conflicting concerns is one of the things we debate when we are allowed to do so.
NutellaonToast - I agree with John V, that your sample is probably biased. Libertarians do spend a lot of time arguing for personal liberty outside of the areas covered by free markets. This blog might discuss free markets a bit more, but that hardly means that libertarians spend little time defending other ideas about or concerns related to freedom.
If overall they spend more time on free markets (and I'm not sure that's the case), then they still don't spend "just about ALL of their time" on that subset of liberty.
Also there may be good reason to spend more time on free markets. The issues involved may be more complex, and also less generally accepted, than say free speech. Perhaps more generally accepted than freedom on issues dealing with subjects like drugs or prostitution but in a sense they are a subset of the idea of free markets, free markets in particular foods or services, and are less important that the larger issue of generally free markets in everything.
As for your example of social inequality, I'm not 100% sure what you mean by that, but most people who bring up issues of inequality are pushing for less liberty, and more government control or intervention in order to get their desired more equal state.
Also, Nutella, is it possible that you most often agree with the libertarian when he discusses civil liberties and that those discussions pass by and are quickly forgotten, while you find yourself in much more memorable debates with him on economic liberty issues?
I ask because I'm at least a semi-libertarian, and I used to go out with a devoted Democrat who accused me of being a Republican (despite my voting record and general disgust with many of the party's stances) since when we argued, I seemed to her to be taking the "Republican" side of the issue. But that was simply because we only argued the economic liberty issues, and not the civil libertarian issues (since we pretty much agreed on those).
"How come all the libertarians I know claim to be for both civil liberties and open markets, but spend just about ALL of their time arguing for the latter and none of their time arguing for the former[?]"
Gosh, someone must be reading different libertarians than the ones I read. Megan McArdle reserves her real passion for the libertarian idea of ending restrictions on sexual activity (admittedly the financially remunerative kind seems to be her biggest concern). Andrew Sullivan spends most of his time campaigning for the libertarian idea of gay marriage. Jim Henley spends most of his time campaigning for the liberarian idea of eliminating the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. The Volokh Conspirators mostly complain about the drug war and free speech restrictions. If there are any libertarian bloggers who actually devote a lot of time to criticizing restrictions on gainful economic activity (other than prostitution and drug dealing), I haven't read them.
The first problem I see with comparing an ideas market with a convention market is that an ideas market isn't really a market. In, say, a tea market, tea costs money to produce and distribute. Ideas also cost money to produce and distribute. However, at any given scale, producing another unit of tea costs the same non-zero amount no matter how much you've already made, while an idea costs virtually zero to copy. Moreover, buying more of one brand of tea over another makes the brand owner wealthier; buying more of one idea than another makes the idea stronger, but its originator only gets maybe a better reputation. The market forces are different.
The next major problem I see is that ideas markets are much less understood. You know how much tea you're selling (modulo corruption); you've no clue exactly how popular your idea is. You'll never know exactly how many people voted for your candidate because of that one point he made about home mortgages.
So, ideas markets will fail in different ways than commodities markets; in many cases we won't even be able to tell if an ideas market has truly failed, or we'll "sense" it without being able to point to anything measurable as definitive.
People also respond very differently to ideas market regulation than to regulation of some commodity. Ideas feel more private. Regulate the tea trade, and people get mad about embargoes and tariffs, but regulate an idea and people get really mad about thought control.
John said:
I guess it depends on your definition of "reasonable". Clearly, the most common externality of free speech is offensive given. Up in Canada this was considered a bad enough externality to warrant intrusive regulation into the "marketplace of ideas" in order to prevent favored groups from suffering the externality of "offense". So either Canada is unreasonable (an argument that I am sympathetic to) or else some reasonable people feel that even the most seemingly mild externalities of the free flow of ideas must be met with stringent government action.
"it's very rare and probably unheard of to have poverty-wracked free countries with extensive civil liberties."
Um... India, the largest democracy in the world?
y81 -
I see I flubbed the blockquotes.
Only "Andrew Sullivan spends most of his time campaigning for the libertarian idea of gay marriage. Jim Henley spends most of his time campaigning for the liberarian idea of eliminating the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. "
and
"So either Canada is unreasonable (an argument that I am sympathetic to) or else some reasonable people feel that even the most seemingly mild externalities of the free flow of ideas must be met with stringent government action."
should have been blockquoted, the rest of the comment is my own words
I was being ironic. My point was that most self-proclaimed libertarian bloggers don't seem to spend any time at all advocating the actual libertarian ideas of lower taxes and less government regulation of garden variety economic activity on their radar screens.
Good question, Nutellaon. Yes, that's exactly the case. Currently. It wasn't always this way. Back in '78, I hung out quite a bit with the local campus libertarians. Back then, it really was almost entirely about civil liberties, with very little attention being paid to the latter. In fact, _those_ guys, the ones mouthing off about 'economic freedom' were seen as - at best - useful idiots for the Man. Beards for wealthy and powerful interests, both corporate and entirely private.
Things change though. By the early 80's, most of the old guard had drifted off, their quaint notions of personal freedoms replaced by an 'edgier' branding. This didn't happen out of the blue. This was part of a deliberate effort to co-opt some sort of intellectual respectability for the policies certain groups favored. "What's good for GM is good for the country" was sounding pretty bogus by the end of the 60's. What was needed was a new formulation couched in 'scientific' terms (who can argue with 'science'?) Hence the founding of Heritage in the early 70's to be followed by organizations like Cato later on in the decade.
Note that they are completely ascientific in method; they spout ideological patter with a heaping side of mathematics to make their theories sound as if they were hatched in a sterile lab, when really it's just the polysyllabic bafflegab of Professor Hill made up to date.
I think a lot of the right, and a lot of libertarians don't get this, any more than their counterparts on the left got it fifty years ago: they honestly don't understand why so many people view them as dupes, fools and rumdums. But the fact of the matter is the Great Experiment has been tried. It's been tried and found wanting, and most people take a dim view towards those telling them that it's an impersonal rain falling on them instead of a deliberate trickle down. They don't like hucksters. Not even hucksters who claim they're scientific. Them's the worst kind.
This will probably get me into hot water, but, what the heck...
Civil liberties versus regulation:
Individuals should be as free from government constraint as possible (with the caveat of the old adage - my freedom to swing my fist ends just before it hits your face). Hence, civil liberties should be protected at all cost up to the point where said rights infringe in a substantive way on the personal or property rights of another.
At the same time, entities such as corporations, utilities, etc. present themselves as non-natural persons, in that they function as an individual actor which exists separately from any of the natural persons which work for its interests. As such, they have the potential for undue influence due to the size of their economic footprint.
The government, then, can be seen as having the obligation to preserve the rights of all of its citizens. Since a single individual have a fraction of the influence as a non-natural person, it falls to the government to function as a non-natural actor on behalf of the collective individuals in its pervue in dealing with other non-natural actors. On of the methodolgies it uses to act on behalf of individuals is regulation.
SoV -
If by "the great experiment", you mean a powerful and durable move towards the libertarian viewpoint it really hasn't happened. Regulation keeps increasing, taxes get cut, but then get raised again, and are never at very low, very libertarian levels.
Also I'm not so sure what you mean by "has been found wanting"
Jay Cd - If you restrict the freedom of corporations, you restrict the freedom of the shareholders, managers, employees, and possibly customers of the corporation, your putting restrictions on real people not just "non- natural persons".
Also the problem with undue influence from corporations increases the more government gets involved in the economy and/or with corporate decision making. Since the government is more involved, the corporations have more ability and more motivation to try and direct that involvement. The more interventionist regulation becomes, the more "regulatory capture" you get, with regulation serving the desires of politically influential targets of the regulation.
Reasoning loosely and probably somewhat sloppily: there are two kinds of government interventions in markets. The first concerns property itself -- what can be produced or how it can be produced. This includes food safety regulations, environmental protection, and so forth. The second concerns types of ownership and control over property. This includes anti-trust laws, insider trading bans, labor and contract law, and so forth.
In the realm of ideas and culture, what people including libertarians are generally concerned to prevent is the former kind of government intervention -- intervention to control the kinds of ideas or culture that can be produced. We are worried about government banning certain ideas or works, or preventing people from producing them in certain ways. But if you look at the latter kind of government intervention, in types of ownership and control over ideas or culture, you find that such intervention already exists on a massive scale, chiefly as intellectual property law. In fact, modern capitalism would be impossible without it. And because there are "market failures" in the system of intellectual property all the time, there are all kinds of government interventions to tweak the law in different directions -- libel law, fair use, and so forth.
I can think of one market failure in the sphere of ideas and culture which is analogous to market failures in the real-property economy. That is public education. The market, left to its own devices, would not ensure that every citizen was well educated enough even to understand the rules underpinning the market economy itself, let alone have the skills for what we consider a "fair" chance to succeed in that market. And so government must supply this cultural commodity to everyone, either through public schools or, in the preferred libertarian solution, with vouchers to buy private education. Either way, the government buys education for the populace, due to a market failure. And this is a government intervention in the market of ideas/culture which everyone, even the most radically libertarian editor at "Reason", subscribes to.
No?
"Note that they are completely ascientific in method; they spout ideological patter with a heaping side of mathematics to make their theories sound as if they were hatched in a sterile lab, when really it's just the polysyllabic bafflegab of Professor Hill made up to date."
Although, I know you didn't ask for it, my advise is to try to step outside of yourself and look at the stance you have taken.
Matt,
There are three areas of government intervention. The one you didn't note is the redistributionist one.
And I would also note that the government is failing in the education part as well if the defined goal is to "ensure that every citizen was well educated enough even to understand the rules underpinning the market economy itself, let alone have the skills for what we consider a "fair" chance to succeed in that market".
Just to supplement the comments noting that libertarians, on the whole, in fact DO argue quite frequently and passionately for civil liberties, but that Nutella and others (such as SOV) may not notice this fact. To the extent your frame of reference is simply "prominent libertarians," it's worth noting that pretty much the sole field in which libertarians have achieved a wide level of prominence and influence is in economics. There are certainly many reasons for this, and I'm not going to pretend to know them all. But it is difficult to judge libertarians as a group for overemphasizing economics when the libertarians most people are most likely to be familiar with are economists. Even when these prominent libertarians try to do something on a non-economics issue, they are relatively unlikely to be heard since most people only listen to them on economic issues (think Milton Friedman, whose role in ending the military draft is rarely acknowledged).
In the "blogosphere," though, most libertarian commentary (at least that I choose to read) is typically well-balanced between economics, foreign policy, and civil/social liberties. In addition to Reason H&R, I'd point most prominently to the work of a number of Cato bloggers, the Rockwell/antiwar.com crowd (much as I may personally find their rhetoric distasteful), and the entire crew at Unqualified Offerings, amongst many others. I'd also add that you'd be hard-pressed to find a journalist who has worked harder to advance civil liberties than Radley Balko.
I would also add that there is often an issue of whether the people you term "libertarian" would in fact be accepted as such by most libertarians. There are an awful lot of self-described "libertarians" who essentially (and perhaps subconsciously) adopt the term under the deeply false assumption that the term simply means "pro-business Republican who is uncomfortable with the Religious Right." There are, of course, reasons why these individuals would come to such an assumption, and the libertarian movement as a whole bears some responsibility for the existence of these reasons (though this is a somewhat inevitable result of seeking to implement policy preferences in a two-party system).
Let me point out that libertarians spend extensive time campaigning against the War on Drugs -- the widest scale threat to civil liberties we face. But people like Nutella don't count that, because they want to sneeringly dismiss that as being a product of self-interest by libertarians who want to smoke pot, rather than a principled stand for liberty.
"There are three areas of government intervention. The one you didn't note is the redistributionist one."
Yancey: you're right, I thought of that after posting. But I think publicly funded education, whether in public schools or through vouchers, is the best and by far the largest example of government "redistribution" in the culture/ideas market, though I don't think "redistribution" is a very good metaphor here. (When an organism grows, does it "redistribute" its DNA to new cells?)
Come now, we've had going on thirty years of cutting taxes, deregulation of business, etc. If certain economic theories are true, we would expect the economy would be better under a Republican administration than a Democratic one. And the numbers simply don't support this theory, for example, the median income in 2007 is still 0.6% less than it was in 2000, despite massive tax cuts.
At some point, you've got to present evidence for your theories, not explain away the many, many discrepancies as 'anomalous data points'.
Sigh. No, _you_ look at the stance that has been taken. Libertarians need to admit that at least some of what they have advocated has been proven to be wrong in the eyes of those they are attempting to persuade. They refuse to do so. _That_ is what causes many people - the vast majority I would say - to view them with contempt and disdain. _Exactly_ the sort of disdain visited on the Communists in the U.S. in the last century.
Cite?
Also, how appropriate is using the very height of a bubble as the baseline for comparison, especially one followed by 9/11?
I assume you'll ignore this because it shows the lacking in your evidence, but just in case...
SoV - We haven't had 30 years of cutting taxes, we've had 30 years of taxes moving up and down. The top marginal rate is much lower than 30 years ago, but the actual taxes paid as a percentage of income is not. As for deregulation - While certain industries that where highly regulated face much less regulation now, in general we have not had any consistent pattern of deregulation. In fact the overall regulatory burden is higher.
So you can't say libertarian ideas have failed, because they haven't been tried in any strong or consistent way. Also the economy has not been what could reasonably be called a failure over the past 30 years.
Blink. The 'they weren't libertarian/Socialist/Conservative/Communist enough' defense? So you're saying there is absolutely no evidence for libertarian ideas failing because we haven't done enough to implement them for a long enough period of time?
Then where, pray tell, is your evidence that they actually work? You do know, don't you, that you are saying exactly the same thing that the old-time CP members were saying decades ago when the failures of Communism became blatantly apparent to just about every informed person?
SoV - Not only have we not "done enough", we have done almost nothing to move to a libertarian system. Its questionable if there has been any net movement in that direction, if there has been its on a similar relative scale to me leaving my (east coast) location, taking a short hike to the West, and saying I've moved towards California.
Then where, pray tell, is your evidence that they actually work
The direct evidence for a strongly libertarian system being superior is scant, perhaps non-existent, because no such system exists, or has existed recently, or probably ever on a very large scale.
The indirect evidence is rather strong. Steps in the direction of lower taxes and lower government control over the economy have generally had positive results.
Ronald Coase addressed this question in an amusing and sharply argued essay, "The Market for Goods and the Market for Ideas". (I skimmed all the way down expecting another commenter would have pointed this out already, but no.)
I haven't got a copy to hand, but in an interview Coase once paraphrased his argument in a way some commenters will find familiar: "It's much easier to tell if you've got hold of a bad can of peaches than a bad idea." In other words, the problem of imperfect information distorting market outcomes is almost certainly worse for ideas than for consumer products.
And Coase could have added (I don't think he did) that the problem of externality is *much* worse for ideas than for other goods. People who make bad judgments about what job to take, what products to buy, or where to invest their money automatically suffer a good deal of harm themselves -- which is why they're incentivized not to make those mistakes if they can help it.
By contrast, there's hardly any disincentive to holding a ridiculous political opinion and voting accordingly. To the extent that your vote changes things, you may suffer -- but so do millions of other people.
I don't actually agree with Coase's conclusion, but he certainly asks a question that liberals (in the American sense) ought to be able to answer. My tentative response is as follows:
When democratically-elected governments regulate the market for goods in order to suppress an apparent externality, they may be mistaken about the existence of the externality, or they may be correct but still end up inflicting costs that outweigh those of the externality itself. But since externalities do exist, you can't enshrine economic libertarianism as an absolute principle.
So why enshrine free speech in the same way? The reason, I think, is that democratic decisions about which ideas to suppress are nearly *guaranteed* to strike the wrong balance. If evil opinions are so widespread that they pose a real danger of being acted on, they'll be too much within the mainstream for an elected government to consider banning them. (Think of the Ku Klux Klan in the prewar American South.) And when evil opinions are so marginal that there's a potential consensus for banning them, they aren't capable of getting enough traction to produce externalities anyhow. (Think of the Ku Klux Klan today.)
If you look at the issue this way, one interesting consequence is that autocratic regimes may actually be *more* justified in restricting free speech than elected ones. This is because they're capable of censoring views that are both misguided and widely appealing -- which of course are the only ones it's potentially useful to censor.
(Full disclosure: I live in China.)
Uh-huh. I thought you said that there wasn't any systematic evidence. I don't think it productive to continue this conversation until you can acknowledge a few basic points. Let me know when you are ready.
SoV - Re: "I thought you said that there wasn't any systematic evidence."
I said there was no (or at best little) empirical evidence about strongly libertarian countries economic performance in modern times because we haven't had such countries to draw evidence from.
I didn't say there was no evidence whatsoever. There is the indirect evidence from comparing strongly statist systems, to mildly statist systems, to relatively free market systems. As you move in the direction away from socialism and heavy statism, you generally get better economic performance.